Languages

Calamity strikes: the writer and translator realizes that her true profession is not lucrative enough. There is no other choice: she joins the ranks of job-seekers and finds a position as a seasonal worker. At Amazon, of all places. Her trip to take the »practical selection test« marks what might be seen as the unmistakeable proof of her social decline. The narrator enters a hall that is isolated from the world, yet reveals a great deal about it. The world of employees, with bosses and colleagues. In other words, the normal world, which repeatedly features here as an absurdly comical or cynical joke. Heike Geißler’s essay is a bold yet delicate exploration of the modern working world, of contemporary life, self-determination, contradictions—and last but not least about books and what they can mean to us.